Managing financial data is often a nightmare for small business owners. Most can’t afford pricey accountants, and few have the bookkeeping and organizational skills to do the job well themselves.
Enter InDinero, a startup taking aim at that problem.
The site, which founder Jessica Mah calls “the Mint.com for small businesses,” offers business owners a dashboard for real-time financial tracking, modeling and forecasting. A snazzy visual interface helps hammer home the meaning of the numbers — like a “cash runway” gauge that shows how many months of financial fuel a company has in its tank.
A recent grad of venture firm Y Combinator, InDinero launched two months ago to glowing reviews and recently closed a $1 million financing round. The site has already attracted 4,000 business clients using the system to track $400 million — and Mah says it’s already profitable.
“More than three-quarters of our customers never used any accounting before,” Mah said. “We expected other programs to be our biggest hurdle — instead, it’s combating inertia.”
Craigslist Inc.’s poison-pill plan was invalidated by a Delaware judge who upheld most of EBay Inc.’s rights as a minority investor in the online classified- advertising company.
EBay, one of the world’s most-visited e-commerce sites, claimed in its lawsuit that Craigslist created its anti-takeover defenses to weaken its role as an investor. While ruling in favor of EBay on those claims yesterday, Delaware Chancery Court Judge William B. Chandler III left in place a provision allowing for staggered director elections. Craigslist officials used that provision to help strip EBay of its board seat, according to the ruling. EBay bought a 28 percent stake in Craigslist in 2004.
The poison pill was enacted “to punish EBay for competing with Craigslist” and not “in response to a reasonably perceived threat or for a proper corporate purpose,” Chandler said in his decision.
Chandler’s ruling will give EBay “access to information that was not available to them,” said Sandeep Aggarwal, an equity analyst at Caris & Co. who has a ‘buy’ rating on EBay shares. “They will not have a board seat, so I don’t know how much they will be able to influence strategy of the company.”
Sure, Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) still has a boatload (to use a favorite term of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz) of users. I still go to Yahoo Finance a lot, for example. Ditto for Yahoo Mail. And I do love Yahoo’s fantasy sports sites.
But this isn’t 1998 anymore. Being a portal doesn’t make you a leader. Having eyeballs doesn’t necessarily make you a financial or technological juggernaut.
While rivals like Google (GOOG,Fortune 500), Facebook and Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) continue to innovate in the worlds of search, social media and mobile, many wonder just what Yahoo is other than a slightly bigger version of AOL.
And heck, even AOL (AOL), which may get a slightly worse rap than warranted due to its former role as an albatross around the neck of my corporate parent company Time Warner (TWX, Fortune 500), has done a decent job of differentiating itself from the competition lately thanks to a keen focus on local content.
So it’s no wonder that Yahoo’s stock continues to slump. The stock is down 18% this year and is only 7% above its 52-week low.
Asymco just published the chart below showing how Apps are being downloaded more rapidly than songs. At this rate, Apps will likely catch up to the total number of songs (expected to be 13 billion each) downloaded some time this year.
Google just announced its new service, Google Instant. Google Instant is a search-before-you-type service that takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions—yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful.
Here’s a video that explains the service in greater detail.
On Tuesday, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, announced plans to make its version of Web TV available worldwide in 2011. Google already has an agreement with Sony to launch this service in the United States this fall.
